Today I spoke at the Sustain IT, Green IT Conference in Central London,  The topic I chose was Green IT through Discipline and Hygiene. My conference notes as well as two of the other presentations are available here on my .mac Public Folder.  (I love the whole .mac Web experience, like most things Apple it is just so well thought out and implemented, drag, drop, publish – wow.)

One of the very interesting things I am picking up is an almost complete lack of grasp of some of the basics of Data Centre energy usage drivers.  There is still a focus on power supply efficiency in servers (a diminishing return as most vendors have now woken up to the bad press inefficient power modules cause).

EU Director General Project Officer, Paolo Bertoldi did get it and was very knowledgeable about the impact of maximum operating temperature on data centre efficiency. Later we had a discussion about the relative merits of DC Power and AC Power in the data center, an area that is still unclear in many minds.

Catriona McAlister from Market Transformation Programme in DEFRA shared a great presentation on the UK Governments approach to driving energy reduction targets, lots of common sense and some great sites.

One of the neatest quotes I heard today was from Gary Hurd, the Technical Infrastructure Manager from the John Lewis Partnership. Apparently the John Lewis light-switch stickers say:

Switch me off, you are burning my bonus

A really cool idea that appeals to the joint drivers of greed and green – brilliant.  Green is Good!

I also heard John Suffolk, CIO HMG tell us all about what he is doing to drive a green agenda. Like me, John is hands on, lets just get it done, lets not burn all the time measuring there is so much low hanging fruit. Refreshing approach, as a UK Taxpayer this is all good news. Just do it much, much faster John and give me my money back please.

Damian Schmidt, CEO Strato (Germany) gave a great presentation of what his firm have been doing around implementing green technology in a huge scale managed hosting environment. Damian made a very telling point, Co-location and green objectives just don’t fit together well. Co-location customers want to place their own hardware in a data centre environment and pay for the space, power and cooling capacity but supply and manage the hardware themselves. Green approaches always need us to pay attention to detail, to standardize, to plan and manage airflow, to optimize workloads. Co-location just gets in the way.

Dr. Mario Tobias Executive Board BITKOM was brilliant. He showed a video of his stand at the Hanover Fair where they implemented green concepts and showed a DRAMATIC 75% cut in energy costs over the period of the show. This is a real hearts and minds approach, where BITKOM appeal to the pocketbook and conscience together.

Steve Pickett, Head of IT, Rothschild was part of a panel session and shared with us his approach to getting things done. A real professional with 9 years as CIO at Rothschild, having come from Oil & Gas and FMCG sectors. The lesson I took away is that good behavior takes lots of effort to ingrain (Steve used the example of USAF Pilots who need 35 training cycles to bang the message home) and just a few slips to destroy the habit (5). A key message is that understanding psychology is key to success and the approach needed to start good behavior may well be different from an approach to make it continuous. We all need to be continuous salespeople.